The Other Woman

I am the other woman
who cries when you hurt
but how do I really know
whether you hurt or not

I am the other woman
who holds back and fears
that you will overhear
the love of my making

I am the other woman
who calls you my lover's lover
my rival, shared enemy
sisters bound to this man

only that I know this no-secret
that you are the other woman
who can access the moonlit passage
to shatter my very heart

Heated History

This girl blows fuses in triple digit temperatures.

Gravestones

Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one's sleep under so
many lids.

- Rilke

From the Book of 'We': 2004-2009 (Decker and Kendra)

I came across this book at the Beloit house and was instantly inspired by the quotes. It's essentially a memory book with experiences shared between Kendra and Decker - with amazing quotes. I feel so much around them - resonating... Here are my favorites:

The flap of the book read:

Warning!
So much as a glance at this book will either...
#1 Make you fall in love
#2 Make you join a convent
#3 Make you jealous (of us!)

Intro:

When love beckons you
Follow her
Though her ways are hard & steep...

For even as love crowns you
so does she crucify you
Even as she is for your growth
so is she for your pruning
Even as she ascends to your heights
and caresses your most tender branches that quiver in the sun
So shall she descend to your roots
and shake them in their clinging to the earth...

All of these things shall love do unto you
That you may know the secrets of your heart
and in that knowledge become a fragment of life's heart

- Kahlil Gibran

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along

- Rumi

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
...if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver (extended part of the quote was taken from Kendra's FB profile)
This one makes my heart ache and an excitement knowing that it's all here.

If you are waiting for anything to live and love without holding back, then you suffer
Every moment is the most important of your life
No future time is better than now to let your guard down and love

- David Deida

For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:
Not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon
We need, in love, to practice only this: Letting Each Other Go
For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it

- Rilke (one of my favorite writers ever)

The last quote (coupled with their wedding pictures):

You must give yourself to love, if love is what you're after
Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter
And give yourself to love
Give yourself to love

- Kate Wolf

Also, another one I took from Kendra's FB. (I imagine that she handpicked all of these quotes herself.)

When you consider the inevitability of death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we are awkward sometimes, care for another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, or enjoy a non-stop expanse of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children that we all are.

- Diane Ackerman

Hipsterism

"...the essence of being a hipster. Pretending you aren't one."

To accept ---

Tuesday, Sep 21st, 2010 -- You may have very specific objectives at work now, but they seem less important when compared to your creative aspirations. Fortunately, you understand the difference between the two. Your job is what pays the rent and puts food on your table. But your dreams feed your soul and without them your life loses meaning. Don't favor one over the other; the key to your happiness is balance.

War Takes Two

Antiwar

Also: restraints on those of us who choose the alternative: The Pope

Indo-Iranian Goddess Anahita of Water

the divinity of 'the Waters' (Aban) and hence associated with fertility, healing and wisdom

You are easygoing and open-minded, though passionate about your values. You have much integrity and resonate elegance and inner beauty. You are a deep thinker, caring and sensitive.

Self-Love, A New Beginning

there is so much beauty
I can see a lot of light

red tapered toes entangled
in hammock mesh rocking
to the splays of sunlight
buzzing on the brown of my skin
lighting the hairs on my arm
fueling this tender soul
with feathered amber

I have seen this light
and its energy runs in me
the child that needs nurturing
cried loudly when the healer hooked
her fingers into the folds
of my heart, punctured and wounded
inside was this frightened girl
"to be seen is a terrible thing"
it's okay, I see you and
oh! you hurt, and that hurt
was devastating and long ago
I whimpered when her fingers
mingled at the hurt, touched me there
the little girl coiling in terror
the heart that collapses,
the heart that implodes
from of all of its feeling
I felt all the wronging
that has been done to me
and the shame of the
wrongdoing that I had inflicted
in seemingly fair retribution

and that was when I saw it -
the light that is my love
I saw the shame of loving
and how I withheld it
in fear that it will turn
its starry face to me
and bite out my fragile heart
I see that I am not fragile
I am a Woman whose caves
of vast feeling and love
is a Woman gifted with the
heavens within her caves
I see that my love is my gift
my love is the doorway
to the wholeness of my Essence
that the love that I extend
is especially for me
that my love for my Self
is the gift to all
through impassioned writing
that I am loud and quiet both
that even shipwrecked and impossibly messy
I would walk up the shore with no less beauty in me
that I sing in a voice that belongs so exclusively to me
that it is anchored so fast to my soul
that I cry at night listening
to the the wonders of my Beauty
living in Song and Music and Poetry
my love and art is my fucking gift
and it is empowered, enamored
by the love that I have for myself

I am no longer ashamed
I am no longer hiding
this love that I felt was for
some time a burden and a curse
that I had felt too much
and expected too much
and only felt the compound
of Hurt in old salty cuts

No Longer
Instead

I seize the world in a way
that I admire in my gut

I can grow old listening
to the child's laughter in my bones
I walk, everyday,
into the terrible mess of life,
and because I survive,
because I cut my teeth
on the human fact of survival
I can share joy,
heap it on others
in bucketfuls
I can see so much in others
I am luminous in all forms of love
I strike chords with my history
forms, words, expression
because when I am open and beautiful,
I can connect with anything -
gnarly human beings, infants,
hummingbirds, the spring wind,
weary souls and fragrant pavements
whose stories I can feel
with the hardness of my feet
I can and always will want
the access to my yearning that looks
like a bird freed to life-journeying
and I love my heart aching
because it is my way of knowing
that I feel, therefore I am Human
I love my Darkness, my Harness for Hate,
the self-loathing that is just
the prickling exercise
of wanting more for myself
I can know myself all my life
or from just last night when I woke up
and feel that I've only scratched the surface
I love my cheeks
and the beautiful inlays in them
extended to my wet waiting mouth
I am worth the pain of everything
the joy of me is voluminous and sustaining
and I love the word 'sustain'
I can hold hands with my love
and we do believe in the same fairies
happiness will not be a myth to me
I believe in the goodness in others
an acceptance and belief
that is priceless and ought to be honored
I am a tenuous shot
but a bright shiny shot
and I am shiny

all of this means love
and I am loving, loving
and it is the beginning
of a beauty that is my gift

the girl long ago
no longer has to protect me
she is free to play
because the woman in me
has come to provide
and she will take care
of the girl and myself
and this woman
will take up her space
her mantle, her gift
and she will not be
afraid to use it

I write, sipping tea
and the light that I see
is the glow that is in me

On the Line

I didn't like the way that he deferred from my depression by trying to relate me to Courtenay's current experience. He may have thought that I wanted to relate to someone in that dark place, especially to someone to whom I am fond of. But not like this. In fact, I despise it. I hate him for not giving me the attention I wanted, and I hated her in that moment for being another focus that isn't me. He took that away from me - these cycles of darkness belong to me.

I think that I can't fully accept what I have because I'm always trying to match his lack of attachment. When he told me that he purged my pain during his ayahuasca journey, my only thought was that he must have been trying to open his heart to all of his girls, instead of "my God, he feels me!" The latter appreciation came later. Even only a minute later, it wasn't the only thing came up. That survival-kick always entered first. I'm triggered by pain in the moment instead of appreciating what I am given. No matter what his intentions are or how he relates to me - I diminish myself in how I see him perceive me. Not in a self-image way... but how much he values me, placing me in some sort of hierarchy of significance in his life. That might not exist. Because I know that I feel for him much more than he feels for me. So I always imagine that his words hold nothing, nothing lasting, nothing deep. I falter recognizing this, and I try so hard to feel what isn't true - that I don't care so much, that I'm open to experience. Since entering the relationship, I've been trying to take in all that is good and ignoring what hurts me. I wanted to be able to love without fear, but I've done the opposite of that. I wanted to be closer to him while being close with Courtenay, and be open to loving others. That's still not the case! I resent him and his other lovers. I close myself off in a tainted protective layer. This isn't real. This isn't me. Unattached love feels foreign and not enough. I can't always fear love like this - I Feel So Much. And by muting my love for Bryan, I can't even love myself. This isn't... fair. I feel like a Fool.

Even now, I'm feeling so much more around this than he will ever feel.

I can't even love Courtenay fully because I know that there's an unspoken part of her that truly wants Bryan too. She told me one night, "so he'll go date another one, and there will be more sharing and less of him that I'll see."

My God, she's right! There's that loving part of me that connected to her deeply because of her want. And there are deeper parts where I have already felt and acknowledged about Bryan that I know will hurt her. Can I be vulnerable enough to show this to Courtenay? To Bryan?

I can't understand why I have exposed my raw tenderness to expected pain. I can't understand if I truly love them too much to let go, or that I am addicted to the hurt.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth.

I hate being a jealous psychopath. I hate having to meter out my emotions, manipulative, insane. I hate that I'm so vulnerable, and I don't feel closer to Bryan every time I leave myself open like that. Just vulnerable and alone. I can't feel closer to anyone, and I feel like a child when I give myself in to feeling closer to others. Vulnerable and alone. I'm tired of... holding back. I've practiced my longing so hard, I'm a champion at Heart Burstin'. I'm tired of my feelings exposed without return, whichever that I express. I'm so hurt thinking that this is love. I don't know how to see through this. I don't know how to let go. I don't know if I can let go. Or that I want to.

I'm not thick-skinned. I'm not strong enough. I'm finally just... feeling.

Thank God.

A Movie Script Ending

Sometimes when I forget to be human, I go back to this band.
This song reminds me that sadness doesn't have to go unacknowledged.
God... high school.

On the Writer

Writing, or being a writer, is another facet of my personality (attachment to what I do and what I want to be). A facet that I am trying to let go in order to simply embrace the love and inspiration of being released into my ability to Express. Once I acknowledged that I write as a varied means of expression, that I an not necessarily A Writer (this is steeped in shame), my will to write without constriction became fiery. I no longer had to grapple with the title, the jobness of it all. I wanted to be A Writer since the fourth grade, when Mrs. Craig said I could. Encouraged, I spent years writing, even when the belief that it would become a "profession" was replaced with other callings, and I always returned dutifully to my words, my appreciation for it running in some deep cave. I am indebted to my gift. I will and can draw on it - without the force of it evolving into a want for renown or God only knows, sustainability.

I write, some days, with heart outstretched.

The Irony of My Unshaven Legs

Fear is personality. Whether the pattern is rooted in childhood or in momentary anguish that goes unexplored, fear is a manifestation of Ego, reoccurring in personality until We recognize that although it was once valid, the anxiety no longer has to be true.

9935 Camrose Cir.

Her disconnection received contributions from a childhood want for closeness and expressing that want to others. When the want to be closer isn't reciprocated, inadequately or at all, the child learns to make herself safe by no longer expressing her wants, withdrawing into vast rooms of repressed want, and the longing for closeness becomes the bricks building the borders of her heart.